Homebrewing video game in development

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seandanger

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UPDATE Feb 08:
Hey everyone, just posting again to let you all know that the game is coming along great and we launched a Kickstarter campaign for the game today. If you visit the page, you can learn a little more about me and my co-developer, and about the game. Please check it out and tell your friends if you think they'd be interested.

Fiz: The Brewery Management Game Kickstarter.

If you're unfamiliar with Kickstarter, it's a way for project creators to raise funding from fans of the project. It gives donors (known as backers) the chance to take part in creating something, usually in exchange for rewards of some type. In our case, we have t shirts, drink coasters, and special in game items. If you're feeling really spendy, you can even design recipes or marketplaces to be included in the game for all to see. The best part about Kickstarter is that if the funding goal for a project is not met within its timeline, then no funding is received, which means you don't get charged anything. This is nice because you can "pledge" funding to a project and not have to worry about throwing your money away if the project creator doesn't get the minimum amount of funds they needed to go forward.


(short version: I'm making a game about brewing beer and want to know if anyone is interested in hearing about it / offering me feedback)

Long version:

Hey all,

My name is Sean, I'm a professional video game developer (by trade) and beer lover (by hobby) and back in May I decided to leave my previous studio job in order to strike out on my own and make my own games. Since then I've been working on a game idea I've had for awhile, in which you play a homebrewer who has decided to quit his/her job and run a brewery full time (its semi auto-biographical) :)

I'm writing here because it's far enough along now that I feel comfortable showing it to others, and I'm hoping people might have some interest in previewing the game's design (and eventually the game itself) and perhaps offering me feedback. I've developed the game with homebrewers and beer lovers in mind, while at the same time trying to keep things accessible for people who might be interested in beer but not know much (or anything) about brewing itself.

So this is just a litmus test to see if anyone has interest. If you are curious about the game, I think it would be fun to be able to bounce ideas off the community in order to create a more enjoyable game for everyone. I'm happy to discuss any aspect of the game and its systems, like how you actually make recipes and get ingredients. If people are into it enough, I could even post weekly progress updates or something. And of course if no one wants to hear about this, I'll shut up about it and participate in other conversations normally :D

The game's prototype name is Fiz. Here are a few screenshots:

Capture.JPG


Capture2.JPG


Capture3.JPG


Please let me know if there are any questions! I'm happy to talk about systems design, recipe editing, more about me, favorite beer, how the game came about, etc.

Thanks!
 
That is really cool, and I'd love to try it out when it gets to that stage. Is your goal more or less to make as much money as you can in your brewery and the game continues indefinitely, or is there some sort of other end game?

What environment are you building the game in?
 
I'm sure you don't want to gear this towards the homebrewer. We can't agree on a process and would find fault in whatever options you choose. That said i would definitely offer input and play the game.
 
Hey shanecb, thanks!

Is your goal more or less to make as much money as you can in your brewery and the game continues indefinitely, or is there some sort of other end game?

This is one decision I haven't yet settled on. Right now, the game ends after 20 years game time, which works out to about 2 hours if you never pause the game (though you'll likely pause when building recipes, hiring employees, etc.). After the game ends, you get a score based on how much lifetime profit you've made. You then are able to pass your brewery "down a generation" and start the game over, except this time with all of your previous equipment, recipes, and employees starting with you at the beginning.

The idea is that with these improved starting prospects, you're able to progress further in the 2nd playthrough than you were in the first. You might be able to afford new items or recipes that you couldn't afford the first time, or negotiate deals with more lucrative marketplaces to sell your beer at, thus making more profit on each subsequent playthrough.

I'm considering a few other options or modifications though. One idea is that you aren't forced to end the game at 20 years, and you can simply continue on if you want, and you can also "pass down to the next generation" any time you want afterward. I could have separate leaderboards for highest profit achieved in 20 years, and highest profit achieved overall if this were the case. Then players could choose.

The other idea I have is adding some narrative to the game via an "ultimate quest", which is "The Search for the Brewprint". The Brewprint is a mythical recipe that will slay a dragon / save the princess / rescue the president, etc. You don't know what the ingredients are, but as you go along and win various brewing competitions, you gain more pieces of the puzzle. The game would then end as you completed the Brewprint and brewed the resulting beer.

What do you think of those?

What environment are you building the game in?

I'm building in Unity, and currently plan on releasing it for iOS and Android. If there's enough interest in those I'd make a PC/Mac/Linux version as well.
 
I'm sure you don't want to gear this towards the homebrewer. We can't agree on a process and would find fault in whatever options you choose.

Haha! Well that is part of both game development and beer brewing, I suppose. Especially from shipping previous games, I know it's not possible to please everyone. I'd still love to hear anyone's negative or positive opinions about things, and I've had some good feedback from my local homebrewing community (Eugene, OR). Thanks for your interest, I'm thinking I'll keep people posted for sure :)
 
If you make it, will they buy it (the beer)? Can you make bad beer, people won't buy?

Is there some kind of advertising, distribution, marketing aspect of the game? That might be a good generation thing. Start Local, then State , Then Region, national, international
 
I love video games; I love beer. I feel like video games about beer is an "untapped" market (get it? lolzolzolzolzolzolz).




Feel free to use that.
 
Cool idea. I'd try it out.

I like the "brewprint" name, but not necesarily the idea of saving a princess or whatever.

I'd like it to be more realistic than fairy-tale, so that I can live out my real-life dreams in a video game. :rockin: More Sims-like instead of Farmville, or whatever.
 
This is awesome!

It would be cool if there were interactions with other real users where you could swap recipes, barter for ingredients and possibly host events at your brewery.

I also like the idea of the Brewpint, but maybe you work to place 1st in a world brewing competition, working your way up from very small local and regional contests and earning "reputation points" that serve as status, as well as entry into other competitions. You could unlock new features as you increase your reputation as a brewer.

Good luck, I look forward to playing it!
 
If you make it, will they buy it (the beer)? Can you make bad beer, people won't buy?

Yes, you can definitely make bad beer! The quality of your beer, like in real life, is based on a number of factors -- namely your equipment and your employees' stats. You can choose stats by leveling your employees and hiring new ones to target which attracts you most. You can tune your staff in order to focus on more risk and more reward by increasing "potential quality", or less risk and less reward by increasing "consistency". Of course you can strike a balance between the two as well.

Is there some kind of advertising, distribution, marketing aspect of the game? That might be a good generation thing. Start Local, then State , Then Region, national, international

Yes again! That's where the quality of your beer comes in. Different marketplaces have different customer expectations.

When you start out, you are unknown as a brewer and can only sell to 1 or 2 marketplaces. One of the first marketplaces, a local corner store, doesn't sell much beer, and as such, their customers don't really expect the beer to be that great. So, starting out, you are able to sell there, but you don't make as much profit as you will later on, once you're selling to a specialty store that caters to drinkers of high quality Belgian beers, for instance. You can even do market research at any of the marketplaces to find out more details on what their customers prefer to drink, and what their spending budget is like. That will give you an idea of how to price your beer, and which styles of beer to sell at which marketplaces. Marketplace customers even change their tastes as the seasons change.

Here's an example of the (beta) Marketplaces view. This is an unresearched Marketplace:
Capture4.JPG


This is what it looks like after you perform some medium level market research, from this data you can learn that making American Lite Lager or Irish Red would be your best bet, and selling them for 28 coins apiece is about the range you want to sell at.
Capture5.JPG


So the idea is that as you grow, you get to choose whether to spend your money on better brewing, higher yields in production, more marketplaces to sell to, more recipes to brew, etc. You're always trying to make the highest profit possible in order to grow your business as fast as you can.

And as you noted, that parlays well into the "generation" aspect of the game -- depending on how you grow the business, you might not have reached international distribution by the time the first playthrough ends, for instance. The idea is that each time you play through again, you discover more of the game. And since much of what you're exposed to is random, it should be entertaining each time.
 
I'm not a big video gamer. Probably because I grew up before computers.
I'm interested in this game though!
I'm not sure how wide a consumer base you have for all your work with the game being based on brewing, but then again I don't know jack about your world.

It looks like it could be fun to me though and I'll watch the thread and see if I have any input worth your time.

To keep it more real, the character should be a slightly portly middle aged guy. That would play to the demographics of the typical homebrewer, but you probably want to appeal to people who buy more games.
 
I would play it! And I'd like to add another vote for "sim like" rather than "saving princesses". I may have missed it, but what device(s) are you planning this for?
 
If you ever played "game dev story" this would be an excellent format to follow or at least get ideas from. I would totally go for a game like this!
 
The other idea I have is adding some narrative to the game via an "ultimate quest", which is "The Search for the Brewprint". The Brewprint is a mythical recipe that will slay a dragon / save the princess / rescue the president, etc. You don't know what the ingredients are, but as you go along and win various brewing competitions, you gain more pieces of the puzzle. The game would then end as you completed the Brewprint and brewed the resulting beer.

What do you think of those?

I'm building in Unity, and currently plan on releasing it for iOS and Android. If there's enough interest in those I'd make a PC/Mac/Linux version as well.

This sounds like a great story line, being a fan of quest-based games. Perhaps we'll see you in the Humble Indie Bundle at some time with your PC/Mac/Linux version, which can totally sync with the mobile version to maintain continuity of the game across platforms?!:rockin:
 
This is awesome!

It would be cool if there were interactions with other real users where you could swap recipes, barter for ingredients and possibly host events at your brewery.

Thanks! I think user to user interactions would be great too, but right now it seems to be out of the scope of the project. Since it's just myself and the artist, we'd be stretched too thin to add multiplayer features. My hope is the game does well enough to fund further development so I can add features like that in later.

I am exploring the idea of having a "taproom" for your brewery that automatically manufactures / sells beer for you, though.

I also like the idea of the Brewpint, but maybe you work to place 1st in a world brewing competition, working your way up from very small local and regional contests and earning "reputation points" that serve as status, as well as entry into other competitions. You could unlock new features as you increase your reputation as a brewer.

That's exactly the way it works :) Competitions have various rewards, some of which unlock new recipe types or new ingredients that you can't make certain beers without. Some competitions can only be entered if your team has a certain stat, something like a "Thieve's Guild" of brewing that you can only access if your team has high enough dexterity. Or a "Chemist's Club Brewing Competition" where you need over 30 intelligence in your team to be able to enter.

I'm glad the people like the idea of the Brewprint. Depending on our target release date, I'll probably add it in.
 
I'm not a big video gamer. Probably because I grew up before computers.
I'm interested in this game though!

That's great to hear. Like I said, I'd love for it to be accessible both to beer enthusiasts who don't game, and gamers who don't brew.

It looks like it could be fun to me though and I'll watch the thread and see if I have any input worth your time.

I'd appreciate that, thanks a lot!

To keep it more real, the character should be a slightly portly middle aged guy.

LOL, we'll definitely have to have an employee or two like that ;)
 
I would play it! And I'd like to add another vote for "sim like" rather than "saving princesses".

Really the quest would be about obtaining the Brewprint, the "save the princess" or "rescue the president" tropes are just jokes for what actually happens when you obtain the Brewprint. They're not so much important as actually getting the Brewprint.

I may have missed it, but what device(s) are you planning this for?

Currently it's planned for iOS and Android mobile phones. I have it running on tablets too but it would take additional time to fix all the various display issues, and the current plan is to release it on mobile first to see if it gains any traction. I don't want to spend another month (and more money on equipment) getting it to work on tablets if the game doesn't sell well anyway.

That said, my team is considering running a kickstarter campaign in order to raise the funds needed to add extra features and bring the game to tablets, so if we wind up doing that, and it's successful, that's a way for us to find out that, yes, it is popular enough to warrant the extra work for supporting tablets. In that case, we would release a little later than currently planned, but add more features and more device support. It really looks great on the iPad so I hope this would work out.
 
So would this be more like a sim game, or would there be some sort of action? i.e. you could have a minigame when you are brewing and you have to spray your boilovers, until you get the right equipment. When you start bottling, the bottles could come down a line and you have to push a button to cap each one as they go, etc.
 
If you ever played "game dev story" this would be an excellent format to follow or at least get ideas from. I would totally go for a game like this!

I have played Game Dev Story and I loved it! I've made a point not to play it since I came up with this idea so as not to get a little "too inspired" from it. But you'll definitely recognize some similarities -- you hire employees, and they all work on a project at the same time. Most other things, such as choosing your projects (beer recipes), and how to market your product are pretty different than it that game, though.
 
This sounds like a great story line, being a fan of quest-based games. Perhaps we'll see you in the Humble Indie Bundle at some time with your PC/Mac/Linux version, which can totally sync with the mobile version to maintain continuity of the game across platforms?!:rockin:

Thanks a lot. It would, of course, be completely life changing to have a game make it to the HIB. That's a long shot though. I'll be over the moon if our company makes enough money from the mobile version just to break even :) That would mean I get to continue making games independently instead of having to find a job in order to pay back my business debt!
 
So would this be more like a sim game, or would there be some sort of action? i.e. you could have a minigame when you are brewing and you have to spray your boilovers, until you get the right equipment. When you start bottling, the bottles could come down a line and you have to push a button to cap each one as they go, etc.

Right now it's strictly a sim game. I've given thought to adding minigames and you have some great ideas for a couple there. Right now I'm planning on not adding them in, in order to limit the scope of the project and to focus on the sim element. One thing I am thinking of having though, is during the brewing, coins or other loot spawn in the room and you can tap them to grab them. Just something to pass the time while you're waiting for your brew to complete (which is no longer than ~40 seconds in any case).
 
I was just reading about The Alchemist's Heady Topper DIPA (#1 on Beer Advocate) and how that's all they brew because it's so popular. They had other brews, but now all they're producing is Heady Topper and are at capacity. Pretty fascinating. Seems like they found their Brewprint. http://www.alchemistbeer.com/

They've increased production, but I'm sure you don't want to get too big, too fast and suffer the fate of Pete's Wicked.

These scenarios would be fun to play out in a realistic game.
 
Do you make your own beer recipes in the game? Or are there built-in recipes, or both? It may be good to have some built in recipes for someone who plays, likes beer, but hasn't started homebrewing (yet) and has no idea how to create a recipe.

I find myself playing with my iBrewmaster like it's a game, just by changing all-grain or extract recipes to partial mash.
 
I agree with the poster; no princess, no dragon, but how about beautiful brewery assistant, and soon to be ex-wife? Because the older portly guy is losing his marriage to to his obsession of brewing beer, and the hottie assistant is making advances towards Mr. Portly, and he is going through a mid-life crisis wondering if he can boff the hottie.

Okay, a little out there I know, but somebody had to say it. :)
 
Don't forget to add that your brewer must log into HBT for "X" number of hours to research brewing systems, recipes, and the "paid supporter" areas.
 
Do you make your own beer recipes in the game? Or are there built-in recipes, or both? It may be good to have some built in recipes for someone who plays, likes beer, but hasn't started homebrewing (yet) and has no idea how to create a recipe.

It does have built in recipes, and you can also modify them, but the recipe system is no longer actually based on real ingredients. In an early version, I had created an actual homebrew calculator that used real data from ingredients in order to calculate all the vitals of your beer, like ABV, OG, FG, SRM, etc. You would choose ingredients, when to add them, and how much to add in real measurements. Unfortunately it ended up being a little too complicated for most people to actually enjoy, the recipe editor was 7 pages long. The system in use now is (similar to some other games) a 3x3 grid in which you place ingredients. If you guess (or know) a proper combination, then you will create a recipe. I think this ends up being more fun and easier to use -- the editor is only a single page now. Here's an example:

Capture6.JPG


So most of the recipes you'll get are built in, but you can change the recipes too. In the blank spots of the grid, you can add your own ingredients -- some that award more XP for your characters, some that add certain flavors that a customer or festival might be looking for, etc.
 
Nice, I applaud your creativity and a little jealous. As another android/app developer (in my free time, I made the android BrewAide App) I have attempted several games, but have never been able to finish do to lack of help with the graphics. If you need a tester for Android, Id be more than willing to test and give any feedback from the things I have learned.

I like what Im seeing now and feel like you have simplified it enough to be enjoyable to everyone but still keep the essence of brewing in it. It kinda reminds me of the restaurant waitress game in play style, which i always loved and was addicted to. Best of luck
 
Sounds like a great game can't wait to try it!

Will the brewing be realistic? What mean is, will the player have to mash in, hold mash temps, sparge, etc. Might be a little complicated for people who don't know how to brew, just curious!
 
Sounds interesting! The more the player would learn about actually brewing beer in real life, the more I would like it. I remember a zoo game I got for my kids when they were little, had to run a little zoo. But the kids also learned about different types of animals in the process and the habitats they live in/foods they like. I even learned quite a bit from that silly game!!! If the game could get non-brewers interested in brewing and even teach them a bit about it, the more successful you will be, IMO.
 
Have you heard of a game called Fish Tycoon? It's rather similar in concept, except you run a pet store that only sells fish. Breed them, upgrade tanks, etc. It's a really dumb game you'd never tell your friends you're obsessed with, but it's addicting and a TON of fun. Your idea seems to follow that concept, and I'd love to spend way too much time on it. I'm a big fan of dynasty/ micro management games. Kyle
 
This looks pretty cool. Do you have a release date on the horizon?

Thank you! We're going to launch a kickstarter campaign in the coming weeks in order to raise funding for the android version and extra features. If that goes well and all the extras get funded, then we're looking at June 2013. If it doesn't get funded, then we'll release ASAP on the iPhone / iPod touch and then add additional platforms if it does well there.

So, as early as March, and as late as June. I'm hoping later rather than sooner so it can have extra features and art!
 
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